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Business Education for Women at Harvard -- the Early Years

In 1962, Harvard Business School admitted women into the full two-year MBA program for the first time. Eight women enrolled in the program in 1963, alongside 676 men. HBS is celebrating the 50th anniversary of this milestone with a series of events and programs, including a new exhibit that traces women’s business education history at Harvard back to the 1930s.

The exhibit, Building the Foundation: Business Education for Women at Harvard University, 1937–1970, covers the period beginning with the founding of the one-year certificate program at Radcliffe College and ending with the complete integration of women into HBS campus life. It includes photographs, interviews, reports, and correspondence from Baker Library Historical Collections at HBS and from the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute.

The first eight women to enter the two-year MBA program at HBS (HBS Archives Photograph Collection: Student Life. Harvard Business School)

The exhibit will run until September 22, 2013 in the North Lobby of Baker Library | Bloomberg Center at Harvard Business School. An accompanying website features some of the items on display, including photographs and oral-history videos of several pioneering women who studied business at Harvard in the 1950s and 1960s. – Carmen Nobel

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